Is Planck\'s Constant h a "Quantum" Constant? An Alternative Classical Interpretation by Timothy Boyer

Thank you for the very nice explanations of classical electromagnetic zero-point radiation, Casimir force and the importance of the Planck constant. Both the historical information and current description give the reader a clear understanding, leading to "It turns out that all the aspects of nature which can be described by quantized free fields or quantized harmonic oscillator systems can also be described equally well within classical theory including classical electromagnetic zero-point radiation."

I was struck by the comment "One place where it was hoped that classical zero-point radiation would be important is in the structure of the hydrogen atom". and the later comment "The electron indeed radiates away its energy as it accelerates in its orbit around the proton".

There are a number of classical structures that can attempt to address this issue. My own submission essay attempts to address this same issue, so your essay was a great and timely read for me. Thanks.

Dear Timothy Boyer,

Yours is a fascinating essay explaining a wealth of material with which most physicists are unfamiliar. A few questions come to mind:

1. How does this relate to the 1998 'discovery' that the vacuum energy is 120 oders of magnitude smaller than previously assumed by QED?

2. From your discussion of non-inertial frames it is unclear to me what relation or correlation the zero point energy has with gravity. Any comments?

3. In particular, does this have any consequences for or insights into de Broglie's momentum-wavelength relation; p=h/l (where l=lambda=wavelength)?

I hope you find time to answer these questions and that you also find time to read my essay on The Nature of the Wave Function. I look forward to any comments you might care to make.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

G.H. Goedecke in Physical Review, 135(1B), B281-B288, 13 July 1964 demonstrated that the Rydberg electron or low-n electron orbiting the central nucleus or ionic core of the atom need not radiate EM radiation if the orbital radius is "an integrable multiple of cT/2", where T is the orbital period.

You get quantized non-radiating orbits.

Goedecke's work was largely ignored, but the fact is that rejecting a classical or semi-classical electron model based on the "radiative decay" argument is false and misleading.

Robert L. Oldershaw

Discrete Scale Relativity

http://www3.amherst.edu/~rloldershaw

Dear Timothy Boyer,

I was very impressed with your essay and your ability to think laterally with regard to fundamental assumptions within the foundations of modern science. It was also extremely well written and very accessible to a lay audience. Although I'm not qualified to understand all of which you are saying, I do get a strong sense of someone who knows what they are talking about. I hope you do well in the competition. Well done.

Dear Timothy: I like your article very much and agree with most of your assertions, in particular that Planck's constant "appears as the multiplicative constant setting the scale of random classical zeropoint radiation" (ZPF). Thus I will comment only on a few points where I disagree. Firstly I think that other ZPF fields are required, in particular metric fluctuations, in order to explain the quantum behaviour of neutral particles. You do not reject this but do not mention it either. Secondly the explanation of the ground state of the hydrogen atom via the e-m ZPF. I am convinced that the solutions of Marshall and Claverie (your Refs.13 and 14) are essentially correct and they do not completely agree with the quantum predictions. The problem is not the self-ionization predicted by these authors (after all quantum statistical mechanics predicts that a fully isolated hydrogen atom is unstable against ionization at any finite temperature, no matter how small, because the partition function diverges), but the fact that they provide no hint about the excited states or the spectrum. The interesting numerical calculations by Cole (Refs. 12 and 22) do not solve the problem. Finally I want to mention the question of the thermal equilibrium. Your classical explanation of the Unruh effect (Ref. 20) seems to me extremely interesting, but I think that it does not prove that classical thermal equilibrium leads to Planck´s law. You suggest that a relativistic calculation would lead to that law, but long ago I showed, in collaboration with R. Blanco and L. Pesquera, that this is not the case (Phys. Rev. D 27, 1254 (1983) and D 29, 2240 (1983).)

Dear Edwin Eugene Klingman,

Your own interesting essay also includes a mixture of both familiar and unfamiliar ideas for most physicists.

In response to your questions:

1. I am unfamiliar with the context for your comment on the vacuum energy for QED.

2. Gravity in my current ideas simply influences the background spacetime for the electromagnetic waves. I do not know how zero-point radiation would influence gravity.

3. In the view given in my essay, the de Broglie relation might be derived as the influence of zero-point radiation upon a particle.

Timothy Boyer

Dear Emilio,

Thank you for your comments. We agree about the value of the idea of classical electromagnetic zero-point radiation; however, you and I are likely to continue to disagree about several related ideas. First, any system which has electromagnetic interactions (even if net neutral) will have zero-point motion induced by electromagnetic zero-point radiation. (The particle zero-point motion in a harmonic potential due to zero-point radiation is actually independent of the form of the small electromagnetic coupling between the particle and the radiation.) Thus I do not know whether or not other zero-point fields are required. Second, I believe that relativity is absolutely crucial for understanding classical radiation equilibrium, both in the ground state and probably in excited states. Claverie and Marshall in their work on hydrogen do not exclude the nonrelativistic Coulomb orbits of small angular momentum and so make an error. Your own work with Blanco and Pesquera excludes the Coulomb potential (the only possible relativistic potential) and so is not relativistic. I believe that my recent relativistic work is significant in this regard.

Is Planck's Constant h a "Quantum" Constant

Planck's constant along with Hubble constant are two most important constants in picophyics www.picophysics.org. While one is representative of natural quantization of knergy the other represents anti-konservation of space.

Quantization of Energy, Space (Linear dimension) and time are results of natural quantization of Knergy. Other quantization constant the electronic charge is not considered primary in picophysics, but related to plank's constant.

Dear Timothy Boyer,

Thank you for your most interesting and exceptionally relevant essay. In last year's FQXi Contest I submitted an essay, "a world without quanta?", where I derive Planck's Formula for blackbody radiation using simple continuous processes and not needing 'energy quanta' and 'discrete statistics'. I show that Planck's Formula is in fact a mathematical identity (a tautology) and not a fundamental physical law. That fact alone can explain the remarkable fit of the experimental blackbody spectrum and the theoretical curve. It's like graphing a circle using measurements and comparing this to the curve using the Pythagorean Theorem. This also explains the ubiquitous appearance of Planck's Formula. Just like the Pythagorean Theorem!

Many other very interesting results in Physics followed from that simple mathematical derivation. Including an 'existence argument' for Planck's constant h. Planck's constant I show is necessary in Physics (along with Boltzmann's constant) in defining the 'temperature of radiation' in Kelvin degrees.

A compilation of my results can be found in my chapter, "The Thermodynamics in Planck's Law" in the book "Thermodynamics: Interaction Studies" published by InTech and available for free downloads at

The Thermodynamics in Planck's Law

Constantinos Ragazas

Hi, Tim. My principal worry about this essay is that I don't think I see anything new in comparison your previously published papers. Is there anything here that you identify as new here?

Although I think you make a decent case for ZPF here and elsewhere, and I have made a comparable argument in my own papers, it seems that the ZPF research program may be "stuck" precisely because it doesn't cleanly identify, question, and substitute an alternative for a widely held postulate. What postulate would you choose, for example, either from the Wightman axioms or from the similar but different "axioms" of Lagrangian QFT, as the postulate you [math]most[/math] want to challenge? How precisely does the "there is classical ZPF" postulate clash with the status quo?

You may possibly remember a conversation in 2005, in which I expressed to you dissatisfaction with the ZPF approach to taking electrons to be particles instead of taking them to be fields, which I also find problematic. Indeed, it seems this choice implicitly challenges the "there are quantum fields" postulate, but doesn't argue adequately, as I see it, for adopting the "there are Dirac particles" postulate.

Hello Peter Morgan. Your comment to Timothy Boyer prompts me to respond. Though you find Tim's new essay saying nothing new, would proving Plansk's formula to be a mathematical truism (and not a physical law per se) relevant and new?

A compilation of my results can be found in my chapter, "The Thermodynamics in Planck's Law" in the book "Thermodynamics: Interaction Studies" published by InTech and available for free downloads at

The Thermodynamics in Planck's Law

I welcome your comments,

Constantinos

Hi Peter,

Indeed I remember well out earlier conversation. Although my views have not changed, there has been progress made on working out some of the implications. The numerical simulations by Daniel Cole and my work on the blackbody radiation in connection with time-dilating conformal transformations in a Rindler frame are both recent successes of the theory. Please remember that my work is a classical theory with particles and fields, and is not a quantum theory at all. In the theory, there are no such things as quantum states in a Hilbert space. As for "Dirac particles," they do not exist in this theory of structureless point particles. Thus there is indeed a compete break with the postulates of quantum physics.

Tim

Dear Professor Boyer

Thank you for sharing your learned views on an alternative explanation of Planck's constant. While some of the more technical aspects of the discussion are beyond, me I could see where your views on zero-point-energy ZPE need to be studied and understood. For way too long the mainstream 20th. consensus on how physics works have blocked the search for an alternative physics that may well be closer to the way Nature works.

Some years ago I have put forward my qualitative and incomplete Beautiful Universe Theory featuring a lattice of identical dielectric nodes rotating and self-assembling to enact all physical interactions. I theorized that the nodes have and transfer angular momentum 'in units of Planck's constant h) to create e/m radiation and matter and mediate gravity. In vacuum the node mutual repulsion explains dark energy - all of this sounds a lot like your ZPE. Except that in my theory the nodes interact causally and linearly and not at all stochastically. Probability is explained in terms of energy transfer between a cluster of the nodes. One consequence of my theory is a realistic explanation of particle interference. The attached graphic shows one prediction of the theory. Hope it makes sense to you!

I would be honored if you and your students would read my fqxi essay Fix Physics! as well as the above theory. And please read Eric Reiter's fqxi essay where he, like you, very ably questions another staple of 20th. c. physics: the point photon.

Best wishes

VladimirAttachment #1: 2_Particledoubleslit_.jpeg

Dear Tim,

Your essay reflects beautifully your intense and successful work of almost fifty years on classical electrodynamics and the zero-point field. We feel that your essay and ours are in good accord and reinforce each other, even if they depart at some points.

We particularly appreciate your study of the relativistic aspects of the theory. Serious consideration of conformal and scale symmetries should lead to further interesting results. With this you continue to be a leader in the field.

Wishing you renewed success,

Luis and Ana Maria

Dear Timothy Boyer

your essay is very nice, with its deep historical roots. There is one point I don't follow. You say "It seems natural to say that the zero-point radiation should not pick out any particular inertial frame or length or time; it should be Lorentz invariant and scale invariant. It turns out that there is a unique spectrum or random classical radiation with these properties." Now the only Lorentz invariant stress tensor is one that is proportional to the metric tensor: [math]T_{ab} = \Lambda g_{ab}[/math] which as was show by McCrea leads to the equation of state [math]p = - \rho [/math]. But radiation as usually understood has the equations of state [math]p = \frac{1}{3} \rho [/math]

So I can't see how these fit together. How are you characterising "radiation"? Also if the stress tensor is conserved, then [math]T_{ab} = \Lambda g_{ab}[/math] implies [math]\Lambda [/math] is a spacetime constant, so this will be true of the equivalent pressure and density also.

Clarification will be welcomed. Thanks,

George Ellis

Only one dimensional Planck constant (h)is fundamental,and as a consequence only the Planck mass (Mpl)unit makes sense.

See my essay http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1413

Dear George Ellis,

Classical zero-point radiation is random classical radiation, and is described in the same fashion as classical thermal radiation except that the spectrum is different. Zero-point radiation necessarily requires a DIVERGENT total energy density; if the energy density of zero-point radiation at a point were finite, then a preferred local inertial frame would be defined. What is required is that the SPECTRUM of zero-point radiation is the same for all inertial observers.

Timothy Boyer

Hi Timothy,

I take issue with the flavor of your essay. For example you say:

"Classical zero-point radiation is similar to classical thermal radiation; it is the ambient radiation present in every part of the universe."

There are no references to this assertion, And I believe it has not been proved.

I would feel much better if I could take my super EM antenna anywhere in the universe and find this radiation. Why has this not been done?

Right now there is the possibility I could take my portable Casimir machine and hop all overt the universe anywhere in the universe. And yes we would see something, but is it ambient background radiation for sure?

Yes, your ideas are very interesting and they may even be true.

Best of luck in the contest.

Don L.

Timothy.

"It is still an open question as to how much of Nature can be described in terms of classical physics which includes classical electromagnetic zero-point radiation."

Perhaps not for much longer. You've just lit up some dark areas I've been exploring naively and ontologically from very different approaches. I expected to understand little of your essay, but rationalisations of my own findings of an 'underlying physical basis' abounded; i.e.

The motion of Earth through the Barycentric frame (still problematic).

The boundary conditions on Maxwell's equations.

'...it should be Lorentz invariant and scale invariant.'

h as the multiplicative constant setting the scale (of random classical zpr).

...quantized free fields or quantized harmonic oscillator systems.

The balance between pick-up and loss leads to equilibrium for electrons.

Motion in Coulomb potential in ZPR doesn't allow analytic solution. (try Navier-Stokes!)

...spectrum invariant under scattering by a relativistic scattering system.

non-inertial frame; assumption that correlation function for random em field involves only the geodesic separation where the field is evaluated.

...thermal bath at a temperature proportional to the acceleration (the Unruh effect).

The particle interference effects when particle pass through slits.

...electron in a finite-size orbit picks up and loses energy at not just the fundamental frequency but at all the harmonics of the basic frequency.

And very many more areas where I hope you may also obtain a fresh view from my own approach. My essay discusses only some kinetic fundamentals and effects as the tip of the iceberg I've explored. You'll not be familiar with the language, but focus on the logic and findings. You should perhaps first look at my current discussions on Eckard Blumshien's essay blog, where I explain the central relevance of scale invariant surface magnetohydrodynamics as a boundary condition. See also Fig 1 of Richard Kinsley Nixey's essay, and consider this in terms of a local non-inertial frame. I hope an overall ontological framework will appear, consistent with your own excellent work.

The concepts were also discussed as a 'Discrete Field' model (DFM) in previous essays here (i.e. 2020 vision 2011). Solutions for many astronomical and other anomalies and paradoxes have emerged. In terms of unification, SR emerges direct from a quantum mechanism, and it seems even Copenhagen can be re-interpreted classically!

I won't flood you with more links to papers for now.

I look forward to discussing more detail.

Peter